BEIJING When China landed its first lunar rover on the moon last month, many Americans reacted with a shrug. After all, the U.S. sent men to the moon more than 40 years ago, and the Soviets landed a rover there too.

But among lunar scientists, the Chang'e 3 mission has generated considerable interest. They say the lander and the rover, equipped with ground-penetrating radar, cameras, a telescope and spectroscopic instruments, could gather significant new information, especially relating to the chemical composition and depth of the lunar soil.

Such data, they say, could shed light on the history of the moon and, by extension, Earth. It could also help humans design equipment to mine the lunar surface for oxygen and other elements.

In addition, experts say, the Chinese mission is testing new equipment and technology that could be useful for future missions manned or unmanned not only to the moon but also to Mercury or Mars.

"The parts of the moon that have been explored are so minuscule," said Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut and International Space Station commander. "It's like saying you sent probes to the Earth, you looked at small areas of California and New York and now you know everything there is to know. That's not the case."

Stephen Mackwell, director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, noted that the Chang'e 3 mission landed in an area the right eye of the "Man in the Moon" distinctly different from previous U.S. and Soviet landing sites.

In the years since Americans and Soviet crafts visited the lunar surface, he said, orbiters launched by Europe, Japan, the United States and others have gathered extensive data about the moon's structure and composition. Now, the Chinese rover may help validate and refine that data, giving detailed information about the concentrations of elements such as titanium, aluminum, iron, potassium and sodium.

Scientists are also watching closely to see how the lander and the Jade Rabbit rover survive the frigid lunar night, which lasts about two weeks. The lander and rover went into "hibernation mode" on Dec. 25 and 26, respectively, and will have to endure temperatures dipping perhaps as low as minus 292 degrees. The vehicles are supposed to endure two such long, cold nights during the course of the mission.

"This is very important for planning other missions, like one to Mercury, which could use a lander just like this one," said G. Jeffrey Taylor, a researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. "Once you get down to minus 80 or 90, the electronics may not survive. They must be in containers with little radioactive heating units to keep things up to a certain temperature so they don't get damaged."

Chang'e 3 also carries an extreme ultraviolet camera, which is to be used to monitor Earth's plasmasphere, and a near-ultraviolet telescope to observe galaxies and stars. Proponents of a lunar telescope say the moon's thin atmosphere and slow rotation will allow for long, uninterrupted observations of a target.

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China's moon mission captivates scientists